About Stewart Nelson

From early black and white darkroom techniques such as toning and hand coloring to the ongoing digital era of fine art, the manipulation of color, texture and light moves my photographs beyond depiction of the real. Instead, I create an altered reality more evocative of dreams or fading memories through techniques such as camera movement during image capture or in post-production in the dark room or on the computer. The final result is an image far removed from the original moment of capture.

Throughout my career I’ve photographed with numerous cameras, including a Yashica Rangefinder 35mm film camera, a Pentax Auto 110 film camera; a $3.95 plastic 110 film camera; the Holga (a plastic 120 film camera); the Diana (a plastic 120 film camera with a pinhole lens); Canon F-1, AE-1 and A-1 35mm film cameras, Canon 10D, 30D and 5D Mark II digital cameras; and various Apple iPhones, including the iPhone X.

I use an Epson Perfection 4990 and a Canon CanoScan 9000F Mark II scanner to scan the 110, 120 and 35mm film negatives for manipulation and also image capture for scanography. With scanography, the flat-bed scanner becomes a digital camera from which I create my art by scanning found objects such as leaves, fruit, paper, old portraits and more. These scanned elements are then composed and manipulated in Adobe Photoshop to create the final image. I’ve been using Adobe Photoshop since 1995 to manipulate the images, and also utilize Adobe Camera Raw and Adobe Lightroom in post-production.